How much faith is too much?

Being an evangelical Christian, I’m all for issues of faith being discussed in the public arena. However that does not mean that my vote for president will be determined by what a candidate believes about women pastors or their interpretation of the book of Genesis.

I’m not sure exactly of what it is indicative, but it seems the most obvious explanation is that the media have no idea what questions (and answers) are important to evangelical voters.

Either the media is trying to play gotcha with candidates of faith (well, GOP candidates of faith) like Romney and Huckabee or they are completely ignorant of the issues that resonate with the faith-based voter.

I suppose one could argue that this is simply another media game of trap the GOP candidate into offending some potential voters, but I think it fits more in line with the recent CNN/YouTube debate (leaving the whole Democratic plant issue aside).

CNN seems to think that Republican and Christian voters care whether each GOP candidate believes every word of the King James Bible as much or more than they care about issues of taxation, government spending, immigration, the war, etc.

I’m much more concerned about Huckabee’s record on immigration than if he approves of women pastors in a Baptist church. I’d much rather see Romney defend his flip-flops than his faith.

It’s not a question of too much faith, but a question of exactly what faith is. My faith is not limited to what I believe should happen in a church or my thoughts on the Bible. What I believe informs all of the issues, including taxes, spending, immigration, war, social issues and every thing else that comes up in a political campaign.

Seeing how as President Huckabee wouldn’t be appointing any pastors be they men or women and Romney wouldn’t be giving a scientific lecture on intelligent design, creationism and evolution, I can more about how their faith guides them in decisions relevant to the office of US President.

12 Responses

The problem is that candidates like Huckabee are running on their religion. It's not a secondary matter with them. Check this out for just one instance. Here, Huckabee is speaking to students at Falwell's university – a different (and real) face from the one he presents to the MSM. He really thinks that God wants him to be president. As such, I don't think it's out of line for the MSM to question him on his religious beliefs: if he's running for Pastor-in-Chief, he should be willing to tell us exactly what he believes. The same goes, I think, for Romney. Read closely, his speech implies that people of no faith, or even those questioning faith, have no place in America. Faith in politics may have its place, but all this has gone way too far. No wonder many of us are so antagonistic towards it.

Hi Louis and Aaron. Wow! Both of you seem to be right on this one:-) Huckabee is running on his religion. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, he says what he thinks and people can can decide whether to vote for him or not. It's much better that a candidate be open about what motivates him it seems to me. But given that, the press has a responsibility to ask Huckabee to explain himself. I have to disagree 74% with Aaron about the so-called media liberal bias. After the media's 20 month War on Gore (and its continuing attempt to demonize Hillary) while giving Bush a 6 year free pass on everything from his misrepresentation of his SS privatization scheme to his tax cuts for the well-healed to his revisionism on the Iraq war, I'd say mythical "liberal bias" has been pretty much debunked. your friend keith

Huckabee wanted to isolate AIDS patients "Mike Huckabee once advocated isolating AIDS patients from the general public, opposed increased federal funding in the search for a cure and said homosexuality could "pose a dangerous public health risk." "Also in the wide-ranging AP questionnaire in 1992, Huckabee said, 'I feel homosexuality is an aberrant, unnatural, and sinful lifestyle, and we now know it can pose a dangerous public health risk.'"

Hi Seeker: I'm not kidding at all. The study you cited, well, the article didn't explain how it determined what counted as critical stories or approving stories, and it didn't tell us details about the stories. But we all saw the media's ginning up the phony Whitewater "scandal" as well as the 20 month War against Gore that led to Bush gaining the Presidency, its love affair with John McCain, its allowing Bush to misrepresent his own proposals from before the 2000 election to well into the Iraq war. If there had been a liberal media then Clinton there'd never have been Whitewater, the media would never have blatantly mis represented Al Gore as an "exaggerator" and Bush as a "uniter, not a divider". The Gore Presidency would be winding down and George Bush would be just another Dan Quayle, a footnote in American history. And the Iraq war wouldn't have happened. your friend keith

The media is not totally one sided, and many of those stories were only stories because congress people pushed them, not because the media wanted to pillory liberals. The surveys clearly show that the MSM gives way more positive coverage to libs than conservatives, even if it sometimes gives positive coverage to conservatives or negative to liberals. That is in part because most (but not all) journalists are liberal themselves, and so they favor their own biases. Liberal media bias to me is an undisputed fact. That's why we had the rise of conservative talk radio and FOX news. Now, they are not unbiased (though if you look at the numbers, FOX is not as biased to the right as NBC is to the farrr left), but to say that the MSM does not have a liberal bias is to be willfully blind.

Hi Seeker: I would argue that THE political stories for the last 15 years have been media distortions against liberals. The whole Whitewater/Impeachment saga, the 20 month total distortion of Al Gore's positions during Election 2000, the free pass the media gave to Bush for the first 6 years of his time in office, the list goes on and on. I couldn't disagree with you more about Fox News v. NBC. For one thing, NBC isn't liberal–you've got the Tim Russerts of the world and the likes of Chris Mathews gushing over guys like John McCain and indulging in cheap character assassination against Hillary, Gore and John Edwards. For another thing, Fox is blatantly biased. That's one of the reasons that a couple of years ago some 70% of the people who got their news from Fox believes that the US had proved that Sadaam had been hiding WMDs, compared to the much more accurate view NPR listeners had about the facts. your friend Keith

The things you mention are anecdotal and subjective. The links I provided are data. For instance, see the Harvard report(PDF) which has real numbers regarding coverage by CNN, MSNBC, FOX, NBC, as well as 11 national papers. Their coverage of the 2008 candidates is typical.

NEWSPAPER COVERAGE: For the top tier Democrats, the positive tilt was even more the case than for Democrats in general. Obama?s front page coverage in the sample was 70% positive and 9% negative and Clinton?s was similarly 61% positive and 13% negative. Republican candidates, in contrast, were more likely to receive clearly negative stories in print than elsewhere: 40% negative vs. 26% positive and 34% neutral. TV COVERAGE: Network evening news closely reflected the overall media when it came to dividing time between Democrat and Republican candidates (49% vs. 28%). While all three produced more stories about Democrats than Republicans, at the NBC Evening News the gap was smaller?just an 11 percentage point difference (41% Democrats vs. 30% Republicans) vs. roughly a 30 percentage point gap at ABC and CBS. The tone of coverage in the 30-minute evening newscasts was much more positive toward the Democrats than Republicans. And again, among the major candidates, Obama got the best of it and McCain the worst. Of the 11 stories primarily about McCain that ran on the nightly news in the first five months of the year, not a single one carried a clearly positive tone. Six of them were clearly negative and five were neutral. MORNING NEWS SHOWS …the shows produced almost twice as many stories focused on Democratic candidates than on Republicans (51% vs. 27%). CABLE NEWS: CNN: The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates?by a margin of three-to-one. Fox News: The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative). [READ: actually, much more fair and balanced than the others!!] When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive. And, in marked contrast from the rest of the media, coverage of Obama was twice as negative as positive: 32% negative vs. 16% positive and 52% neutral.But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data. [emphasais mine] MSNBC: On MSNBC, a positive tone pervaded coverage of candidates from both parties. Nearly half (47%) of the stories about Democratic candidates were positive, vs. 19% negative and 34% neutral. Coverage of Republican candidates was not quite as rosy but still more stories were positive (38%) than neutral (33%) or negative (30%). [READ: MSNBC was more balanced and positive than anyone – note that, though they are affiliated, MSNBC and NBC are not the same]. NPR RADIO: Like the media overall, the first 30 minutes NPR?s Morning Edition produced more stories about Democratic candidates than Republicans (41% vs. 24%). What was different was how little negative coverage Democrats received, especially compared with all other media. Stories about a Democratic candidate were more seven times more positive than negative: 41% positive vs. 6% negative. The majority of coverage, 53% of stories, was neutral.

So overall, it looks like you are right about NBC/MSNBC – not as liberal as cnn or abc, but still, liberally slanted like ALL of the media outlets except fox news, which showed somewhat of an opposite slant, though it seems not a clear bias like much of the liberal media. But also, don't forget the recent study of party affilation among journalists (I'll find it tomorrow).

Getting back to the original topic of this thread:Check this out: Government may have dropped the ball in modern American society, but religion dropped it first, Gov. Mike Huckabee told Southern Baptist pastors Sunday night. "The reason we have so much government is because we have so much broken humanity," he said. "And the reason we have so much broken humanity is because sin reigns in the hearts and lives of human beings instead of the Savior."Huckabee also explained why he left pastoring for politics. "I didn't get into politics because I thought government had a better answer. I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives." He compared his entry into politics to "getting inside the dragon's belly," adding, "There's not one thing we can do in those marbled halls and domed capitols that can equal what's done when Jesus touches the lives of a sinner." Thus spake the theocrat.

I don’t think that this fits the strict definition of a theocrat, but it does speak of an overly simplistic and religious approach to politics. While I think that a return to scriptural *principle* will solve many of our governmental problems, the gospel in politics is not really the solution. In fact, the solution for our cultural problems probably IS a return to the Christian gospel by individuals, but that is accomplished by the preaching of the Church and private citizens, not government.

I guess extracting certain principles from the Bible and applying them would be beneficial. However, Huckabee and his ilk don’t want to do that; instead, they want to bring the nation to Christ. This is a theocratic goal. If Huckabee want to mount an xian crusade he should remain a minister and quit running for public office. btw: These principles I mentioned above can also be found in other religions and, in fact, don’t rely on religion at all.